Emergency Broadcast Network


'Rob Deacon Rob Deacon

"Media are a weapon," says EBN front man Josh Pearson. And he means just that, as the performance of the five media guerillas from Rhode Island proves. They point this weapon at those who normally wield it. Politicians, television companies and time and again the military are the target, the victims, of the brilliant video samplings of EBN. With hard beats, brutal cutting and an uncompromising live performance, EBN shows the way forward to a pro-active attitude in the age of information that not only challenges the image of the media, but can also transform it.

With revolutions every minute in entertainment and creative technology; audio-visual manipulation software, the advances brought about by digital encoding, optical transfer and digital storage and the new entertainment systems that these advances are creating, there has to be a new take on what is providing the entertainment. It’s all very well having flat screen surround audio-visual in every room of your house, operated from a remote control and beamed direct into your control box by a satellite that’s transmitting the signal from an optical disc being accessed in Houston, but are you really going to get excited by another Rolling Stone reunion plastered all over your walls once the millennium is just a memory of a well spent defence budget?

Enter Emergency Broadcast Network, the first of a new strain, perched somewhere between a band, a DJ and MTV. They’ve been under construction since Pearson met Gardner Post [Systems Manager] at Rhode Island School Of Design over ten years ago, where they began collaborating on multimedia "press conferences" featuring painting, sculpture and video. Their ideas came closer to fruition, though, when Ron O’Donnel, a DJ, introduced himself at one of their seminars in 1990. Taking the role of "Spin Control", O’Donnel offered the duo a focus for their visual experiments.

This is the key to what makes EBN so different. Unlike many new acts who spend their formative years cutting and pasting tape loops and samples of their favourite records, EBN spend theirs cutting, pasting and sampling their favourite videos, using as source material a cataloque of tapes they’ve been collecting since the early ’80s. So, unlike any conventional group, who compose and create their music, then making a visual to go with it, EBN painstakingly create their music on threequarter inch offline, frame by frame, note by note, thus making a soundtrack that is already completely interactive with an array of provoking, stimulating and entertaining video footage.

And unlike a band that might tour toilets for years before attracting a record company, EBN converted an ’80s Chevy Impala truck into the Emergency Broadcast Vehicle, complete with projector and screen in the form of a satellite dish mounted on its roof, which they took on the 1991 Lollapalooza tour, broadcasting their first messages to a bemused new audience.

"What we’re doing is a direct parody of a major broadcast system, hence the name – to point out all of its absurdities and its methods of control over people, at the same time as entertaining and stimulating them", concludes Pearson.